Pieces of April, 2003

For months after I first saw “Pieces of April” I was angry: I wanted to write to the producer and say, “We don’t throw up any more. Women with breast cancer don’t throw up during treatment any more.”

That one thing about the movie made me so angry, and even now I can’t say why except that I had never thrown up during my breast cancer treatment to that point.

In 2003 when I saw the film, I was five years into my life with cancer, and not quite to the two-year anniversary of my cancer going postal (i.e., metastatic) on me.

I was, as I recall, in clinical remission on a regimen that included the miracle drug Herceptin, and I think I was in major denial about the fact that my cancer could not be cured.

That’s the only reason I can think of that I got so angry about the throwing-up thing. Because Patricia Clarkson’s portrayal of a woman who has to stop to vomit at every rest stop along the way from the suburbs into Manhattan is the funniest, and truest, thing about the movie.

Joy (Clarkson) snipes back at her family as they hover over her cooing, “How aaaare you?” every time she so much as breathes, or, at one point, appears not to be. She’s the kind of cancer patient I appreciate: unsentimental, pissed off at the world, and funny.

Just a Saturday Afternoon at the Movies
“Pieces of April,” is, in fact, responsible for this entire Cancer Movies section of my blog.

I went to see it in the fall of 2003 with my then-13-year-old younger son (He was 8 when I was first diagnosed, so a pretty big chunk of his real life had been just one long cancer movie). We’d seen the preview (not even a hint about cancer) and thought it would be a fun movie to see.

So there we sat, all unsuspecting, popcorn and sodas in hand, blindsided at about minute eight in the film when it became clear that the mom, Joy, had cancer.

Seventeen minutes into the movie, Joy throws up for the first time, in a grungy public restroom. At that point, I wondered if we should walk out. (We consulted in whispers over the popcorn.)

A few minutes later, Joy’s wig falls into the toilet while she is throwing up at yet another rest stop, and that was the turning point: My son and I decided to sit back and enjoy the cancer humor.

Sick, yes. Black, yes. But so true to (my) life. Except for all the vomiting, of course.

And Clarkson does a wicked, bitchy, terminally ill woman. (Note: several reviews say her character was terminally ill. You can’t tell that from the film; she just looks like a woman undergoing chemo—bald, thin, bitchy.)

Choose “Pieces of April” to see Clarkson in action, showing off photos of her chest pre- and post-mastectomy, slashing at her overly solicitous family, and leading the family in a graveside service for road-kill that she insists they stop and bury. Ignore Katie Holmes, who played April before she was Katie Holmes, AKA wife of Tom Cruise, mother of Suri, staple of tabloid covers. Holmes is cute, but somewhat miscast as the bad daughter of this dysfunctional family.

Warning: If you don’t come from a perfect, loving, supportive family (and who does?), this movie may punch some buttons with its themes of togetherness and resolution over a holiday meal, even though that part of the story is pretty hokey.

But hokey can still make you cry, especially if you haven’t spoken to your mother in years. Just a warning.

@ Jeanne Sather 2007.

Comments

[Nancy]

I happened upon "Pieces of April" one night while channel surfing. Diagnosed with breast cancer 18 years ago and now active on breast cancer political issues, I was all the more drawn in when I realized the mom (Clarkson) had the disease. I'm not sure there is any one right way to portray this disease in a movie. I like this film's approach because it's not just about the disease. It interweaves a bunch of funky apartment neighbors, family humor and angst, and a tear-jerker family reunion ending. I've watched it several times and have recommended it to others.

[Sara]

I just wanted to let you know that I finally saw this movie, which I would have overlooked if I hadn't seen it mentioned here, and that I loved it and thought it was beautiful.

I think a lot of how we see a movie has a great deal to do with what comes with us into the theater, so because of my own experiences with my own family both as April and as almost every single person in the car, depending on what year we are talking about, I was able to see this family having its one happy meal -- a hard-won one, not glibly achieved at all -- as just a moment in this family's life, not a hokey permanent change of status at all. I liked that the future was not spelled out, and that the past was just referred to in bits. Nothing was overwritten. No promises were made. It was really just about that one meal, and how they got there, and what it meant for April.

I thought Joy was a great character because Patricia Clarkson is such a brilliant actor. In the little "making of" featurette included on the DVD, the director praised her as being "not afraid to make an ugly choice." This praise segued into a clip of the scene where she criticizes the way her son rolled the joint he's handed her and instructs him how to do it better in the future, and why, all sort of clinically, as if explaining something completely innocuous and impersonal like how to weed a garden.

Pretty great.